Pete Higgins
pete@peterhiggins.org
Seattle, WA 98117
(253) 218-9075
Employment
Estately, Software Developer, March 2015 - Present
Perform maintainence of the company's main Ruby on Rails app and supporting services and projects. This includes designing, implementing and maintaining features across the stack including main rails backend, frontend, and data processing backend services, mentoring junior devs, code reviewing, and pair programming, identifying unused and inneficient legacy code that could be removed or refactored, and debugging persistent, intermittent problems across the stack and test suite.
Harvest Exchange, Software Developer, January 2013 - February 2015
Led the ongoing maintenance and development of a small startup's web product written in Ruby on Rails. Primary duties were designing, prototyping and implementing additional features and new products, refactoring and optimizing the data model, API development for an in-house iOS app, integrating with a 3rd party API provider as an integral data source, maintaining and reimplementing full-text search with Elasticsearch and Postgres, getting the deployment and monitoring setup streamlined and reliable, and frontend development on the dynamic web interface.
Substantial, Software Developer, July 2011 - December 2013
Responsible for full stack development of customer websites using Ruby and Rails. Responsibilities included gathering requirements with the 3rd party client, implementing desired interactive and visual design, designing and implementing the data model and backend, and deploying and maintaining web applications.
HP (formerly Melodeo), Software Engineer II, June 2010 - July 2011
Developed a framework for building Ruby daemons that communicated with AWS's SQS and SNS, enabling easier development of workers that process long-running tasks and pipelines while standardizing configuration, deployment, and monitoring.
Implemented a Ruby web service to run on desktop PCs that acted as an intermediary between a Windows application, S3, and our remote servers. Created using Eventmachine, the asynchronous Ruby library, to enable multi-threaded transferring of data while remaining responsive to user input.
Melodeo, Software Engineer, September 2006 - June 2010
Developed Ruby daemons combining input from web services and user data to produce distilled data used in web applications. Involved parsing and creating XML, full-text searching with Sphinx, and de-normalizing data in MySQL.
Improved badly performing web applications by profiling, rewriting monolithic Rails code in a more idiomatic and modular way, improving test coverage, and reducing code duplication.
Rescued a Flash project written by a non-programmer, which was an interactive embedded audio and video widget that communicated with a backend webservice.
Melodeo, Software Test Engineer, September 2005 - September 2006
Managed all QA operations for mobile phone applications. Involved writing and executing manual test plans, maintaining a bugtracker and wiki of all QA activity, automating documentation generation and application build customization, and managing the activity of interns.
Skills and Technology
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Experienced writing robust, well tested code in Ruby, have written code in Haskell, JavaScript, Java, C, Python, ActionScript, Bash.
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Some experience using frontend technologies Sass and SCSS, Haml, and CoffeeScript.
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Very familiar with Gentoo and Ubuntu Linux, also familiar with Windows and OSX.
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Familiar with the APIs of various Amazon Web Services (SQS, SNS, S3).
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Background in technical support, Q&A and tutoring.
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I have contributed to numerous open source projects such as the ruby language, webmock, eventmachine, rspec, minitest and Refinery CMS
Education
- BSc in Computer Science from Boise State University, June 2005.